If you want to improve your health, physique and mind let me tell you straight away there are no quick fixes, however there are still lots of companies and marketers out there that would have you think otherwise. It’s a very alluring thought, that you can abuse your body for years with poor diet and lifestyle choices and all that can be irradiated by a 5 day ‘cleanse’ that apparently ‘purify you from head to toe’. Like hitting the reset button, all of a sudden you’re a fresh, clean, healthier and leaner version of yourself that is now super-motivated to sculpt the body you have always wanted. Unfortunately it’t not quite as simple as that…

What are they?

Basically a detox diet, juice diet, cleanse etc are hyper-restrictive diets that usually consist of not eating any solid food whatsoever for 5-7 days and just surviving on fruit and vegetable juices for sustenance. They make claims such as rapid fat loss, detoxify harmful chemicals, improved immune system that all looks very appealing.  For example there is one (which shall remain anonymous) which prescribes 6-12 glasses of lemonade with maple syrup and cayenne pepper. Ingested daily as your only sustenance, this concoction supposedly removes all toxins from your body and, according to it’s creator, “supports the elimination of every kind of disease.”

All these companies will all have you believe that your body is a bubbling cauldron of toxins and poisons that you need to address immediately. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, “toxins are substances created by plants and animals that are poisonous to humans. Toxins also include some medicines that are helpful in small doses, but poisonous in large amounts.” In the context of these detox diets though they say that the toxins are what build up on the body over time due to pollution, poor diet with added sweeteners or flavourings, chemically treated foods, heavy metals etc. Which is true to a certain extent, the body does absorb toxins from pollutants that we breathe in and chemicals we may ingest (mercury in some fish for example). What they neglect to mention is how our liver, kidneys, lungs and other organs all do a perfectly good job of detoxifying the body, which is a good job to because if they didn’t and we were as poisoned as what detox companies want us to thing, we would need to be rushed to hospital for professional care not to just neck a vegetable juice. 

Another point worth making here is that it’s the dose that makes the poison, so the levels of a lot of these chemicals that make their way into our bodies are no where near high enough to cause any negative effects whatsoever. Similarly to things like aspirin and paracetamol which you obviously purchase over the counter would kill you if you took enough of them, but in small doses are perfectly fine and even beneficial. Caffeine and even water can be over-consumed and kill you which you will know from what I have spoken about in previous articles regarding caffeine supplementation and hydration. 

So what’s the problem?

Why do people love them so much? Some people swear by them, purely based on anecdotal evidence from themselves or what their mates have told them. The main answer that people buy into them so much are because they claim “rapid fat loss”. It’s true, you will lose weight on these diets very fast, but there is a big difference between rapid weight loss and fat loss. 

These diets as I have already said are very restrictive, pretty much zero carb and zero solid food approaches to dieting, you will probably be expending the same or similar amount of energy but the amount you put back in will be drastically less. For every gram of carbohydrate stored in the muscle (as glycogen) will draw in 3g of water, so if our muscle carbohydrate fuel tanks are fully depleted vs completely full the difference in body weight could be around 5kg (depending on muscle mass). So this initial 5kg the person would lose would make them psychologically feel amazing and slim but as soon as they ate like a normal human being again it would go straight back on almost overnight. Then add into the mix that there is just less solid food in the digestive system at any given time as liquid will just pass straight through meaning the weight loss could be around 7-9kg in total! It’s the same as weighing your car when it’s got a full tank or an empty tank, one will be less but it’s still the same car it’s the same size and everything! 

Another reason they don’t work long term for fat loss for most people is because of how intense and restrictive they can be, you cannot wait to get to the last day and usually convince yourself you must celebrate this achievement of doing your cleanse with a big fancy meal at a restaurant. So this fad, crash diet approach will just result in a binge mentality, followed by bloat (due to overfeeding) and possible digestive issues from suddenly reintroducing lots of things back into the system at once that the body may have down regulated the specific digestive enzymes that deal with them, such as the lactase enzyme that digests dairy products. 

So having established that they are not very good for weight loss in the long term at least (and by long term I mean anything longer than a week) do they actually work for getting rid of toxins and pollutants in the body which they so boldly claim they do? Well when you make such a claim, it’s usually a good idea to be able to actually name some of the toxins and be able to measure the levels of which in the body before and after to prove the diet works right? Unfortunately, a 2009 investigation showed that when questioned, not 1 out of 15 detox product selling companies (everything from smoothies to hair and skincare) could give any sort of evidence to back up their claims or safety. They couldn’t even name a single toxin the product was supposed to get rid of and none of the companies could even agree on the definition of the word ‘detox’.

Another fundamental problem with these fad, crash diets is when we actually look at HOW the body cleanses and detoxifies itself naturally. Without being you with too much detail, Glutathione in the body is like the scavenger that collects all the toxins and stuff thats not supposed to be floating around the body, labels it so the body can identify it as harmful and begin the excretion process through the liver and kidneys. One of the FUNDAMENTAL things that the body needs to process all this junk through the liver (besides ample vitamins and minerals) is amino acids I.e. protein. If you’re just drinking juices with barely anything in them, you’re not getting hardly any protein so the liver cannot take these toxins from phase 1 to phase 2 detoxification. So then it cannot excrete them through the kidneys so you just end up with all these toxins building up in the liver which can then present itself through bad skin such as spots or rashes. Some people however would tell you that if this is the case, “don’t worry because thats just your body detoxifying itself it’s shows you that you really needed to do it” when in fact it is the complete opposite. 

To sum up…

Just to play devils advocate for a minute, in some peoples lifestyles that are SO unhealthy, and by that I mean completely sedentary and reliant purely on convenience and fast foods plus smoking and drinking etc, that doing a detox juice cleanse is probably much better than how they were eating before, so in that context it could possibly be argued that they are a good thing. However the points that I have addressed above are still valid, why get someone from one extreme to the other that will just set them up for failure because of how difficult it is to just survive on some juices everyday with no solid food after previously gorging on thousands of calories of junk everyday. 

Basically there’s absolutely no scientific literature supporting these fad diets, and a load of it that will confirm they are in fact a scam, but even these studies are hard to take too much from as they are just too many variables to consider. So why go for an option that’s unsafe, ineffective, unsustainable, expensive, hyper-restrictive, difficult (it’s practically fasting), declines performance in the gym massively, promotes binge episodes and rapid regain immediately after when you can just eat healthy and exercise in the first place? There is nothing wrong with drinking vegetable juice, but thats not to say that thats ALL you should have and that that’s healthy because it’s just unnecessary, you should strive to eat a diet with enough protein, the right amount of calories, plenty of vegetables and some fruit so you’re getting enough vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and with a clever supplementation programme will (over time) create a body that is healthy, strong and aesthetic. 

Credit: examine.com